another voice in the babble on the net

Category: trivial musing

The UK Parliamentary petitions site is currently hosting what appears to be one of the most popular it has ever listed. The petition seeks to gain support for revocation of article 50 so that the UK can remain in the EU. Personal politics aside (though in the interests of transparency I should say that I …

OK, I admit to being dumb. I got another scam email yesterday of the same formulation as the earlier ones (mail From: me@mydomain, To: me@mydomain) attempting to extort bitcoin from me. How? What had I missed this time? Well, this was slightly different. Checking the mail headers (and my logs) showed that the email had …

I mentioned in my previous post that I had recently received one of those scam emails designed to make the recipient think that their account has been compromised in some way and that, furthermore, that compromise has led to malware being installed which has spied on the user’s supposed porn habits. The email then attempts …

I have been running my own mail server now for well over a decade. Whilst the actual physical hardware (or actually VPS system) may have changed once or twice during that time, the underlying software (postfix and dovecot on debian) has not really changed all that much. However, what has changed over the last decade …

I normally post a “happy birthday trivia” message at this time of year. Indeed I have been doing this for 12 years now. Of late my posting has become less frequent which is somewhat odd since I now have much more free time than I had back when I started trivia. But no matter – …

When I posted yesterday I noticed that there was a new version (5.0) of wordpress available for installation. So I decided to spend a short while today upgrading as I always do when a new software version is released. But I hit a snag – a big one. The new version of wordpress includes a …

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with GCHQ, but ex GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan’s recent comments in an interview with the BBC Today programme struck a chord. Hannigan headed GCHQ from April 2014 until his resignation for family reasons last year. Whilst in post he pushed for greater transparency at the SIGINT agency. …

Back in June 2015 I decided to force all connections to trivia over TLS rather than allow plain unencrypted connections. I decided to do this for the obvious reason that it was (and still is) a “good thing” (TM). In my view, all transactions over the ‘net should be encrypted, preferably using strong cyphers offering …

In 1909, Franz Kafka wrote the “Inclusion of Private Automobile Firms in the Compulsory Insurance Program” as part of “The Office Writings”. His experience of tortuous bureaucracy in Insurance and elsewhere was later reflected in one of his most famous novels “Der Process” (known in English translation as “The Trial”). Back in October last year …

I’m a couple of days late this year. I normally post on Christmas Eve, trivia’s birthday, but hey, I’ve been busy (it goes with the territory at this time of year if you are a grandparent). This year I thought I would depart from my usual topic(s) and post a couple of pictures marking the …

I use email fairly extensively for my public communication but I use XMPP (with suitable end-to-end encryption) for my private, personal communication. And I use my own XMPP server to facilitate this. But as I have mentioned in previous posts my family and many of my friends insist on using proprietary variants of this open …

Well, sliderule, actually. The ‘net is a truly wondrous space. I can’t recall exactly how I stumbled across the “International Sliderule Museum” but it is such a wonderful resource devoted to a tool which most people under the age of 40 will never have used that I just had to post a link to it. …

Dear Amber So,”real people” don’t care about privacy? All they really want is ease of use and a pretty GUI so that they can chat to all their friends on-line? Only “the enemy” (who is that exactly anyway?) needs encryption? Excuse me for asking, but what have you been smoking? Does the Home Office know …

Back in January 2011, I posted a brief note about a site hosted at the domain “ismycomputeroff.com“. I have just had occasion to look again at that site and found that the domain is now definitely off. It is parked at sedo and is up for sale at the ludicrous price of 599 euros. Tell …

With the passage into law of the iniquitous Investigatory Powers (IP) Bill in the UK at the end of November last year, it is way past time for all those who care about civil liberties in this country to exercise their right to privacy. The new IP Act permits HMG and its various agencies to …

Dmitry Bogatov, aka KAction, is a Russian free software activist and mathematics teacher at Moscow’s Finance and Law University. He was arrested in Russia on 6 April of this year and charged with extremism. He is currently held in a pre-trial detention centre, and is apparently likely to remain there until early June at least, …

psp

random

“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.”